Jonathan Littell, Nancy Huston, Alain Mabanckou, Léonora Miano
French authors can hardly be faulted for not being productive: over the past two months, they have published no fewer than 475 new novels.

Yet despite all this creative energy, probably the most striking feature of this fall’s literary season is that of six coveted book prizes, four went to novels written in French by non-French authors.

The New York-born writer Jonathan Littell took both the Goncourt and the Académie Française prizes for “Les Bienveillantes,” or “The Kindly Ones,” which has already sold some 280,000 copies. The Femina prize went to “Lignes de Fille,” or “Fault Lines,” by the Canadian-born novelist Nancy Huston, while “Mémoires du Porc-épic,” or “Memoirs of a Porcupine,” won the Renaudot prize for the French-Congolese author Alain Mabanckou.

French writers did win the Inter-allié and Médicis prizes, but there was yet another foreign footnote: the so-called Goncourt des Lycéens, awarded by a jury of high school students, went this year to “Contours du Jour Qui Vient,” or “Contours of the Day to Come,” by Léonora Miano, a 33-year-old author from Cameroon.

So what, if anything, does this say about the current state of French fiction? “I’d say it is a good thing because it shows that French literature is being enriched by people who bring their culture and background to the language,” said Antoine Audouard, a French novelist whose latest book, “Un Pont d’Oiseaux,” or “A Bridge of Birds,” contended for several prizes this fall. “For a long time, France did not recognize its Rushdies. [...]”

Read more (New York Times)
[tags]France,French,French literature,Jonathan Littell, Nancy Huston, Alain Mabanckou, Léonora Miano[/tags]